What Brand of Dissent is this?

What brand of dissent is this?

There is something deeply disturbing about home-grown terrorism. The young men from Leeds, aged between 19 and 30 years, are allegedly the four suicide bombers behind the recent blasts on London’s transport system. Documentation was found near their bodies – ID cards, birth certificates- they wanted the world to know who they were and what they did. What will remain a mystery is why they did it? We will continue to ponder over this and as we struggle to come to terms with the enormity of the problem before us, there will be more terror. We will be powerless to deal with it unless we rethink some basic questions. Why would young male citizens in a democracy feel the need to resort to terror? What were they fighting for? What were they fighting against? Where did law and constitutionalism go wrong? Who got to them before reason and rational thought did? What brand of dissent is this?

In our worldview, thousands of us will generalize and say – those Muslims did this! We will pass hasty judgments and many of us will insult Muslims in public, write articles and hate mail to them, stop talking to our next door Muslim neighbor and basically try and stand up to terrorists and terrorism by discriminating against thousands of innocent Muslim women and children who have no say whatsoever in what I see primarily as a masculine political project. We will soon instill the same paranoia and bigotry in our children and therefore instead of getting rid of terror we will build future schisms and perpetuate fault lines of antagonism. We are quick to blame terrorists and admittedly we never find out what their side of the story is. Terror is relative. Military coercion is terror in the same vein that Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization. The difference is supplied by us academicians who come up with theories of ‘just war’ and ‘terrorism’ and ‘international security’. No war is just and in the same vein no act of terror is justifiable. Yet there are double standards. We think of the war on Iraq as a ‘war of liberation’ and we think of the blasts in London as terror. All acts of violence spread terror. That is what violence is there for - discipline through punishment and fear. Militaries spread terror too and right now the people of Iraq are probably more terrorized than the people of London. This is not to trivialize the blasts of London and support militant outfits but to push forth the argument that the production of knowledge and its various sources of dissemination have their roots in the hegemony of militarily and economically powerful nations. This is why we end up believing what we are told about righteous and mighty military powers defending freedom and those awful terrorists who have no respect for human rights and are enemies of freedom.

Let’s set some basic things straight. No one in the world is free. Freedom is not only relative but is also the biggest eyewash in the world. We are all shackled by culture, color, gender, race, dress, codes of conduct and our nation states. We can never secede from certain things – amongst these I place nation states and Coca Cola Corp. Our movements are limited and monitored by states; our thoughts are conditioned through a structured education system which we are not at liberty to challenge. So if we are told democracy is great a million times in our childhoods we grow up being liberal democrats. And the penalty for changing and challenging this hypnopaedic conditioning is grave. If I challenge democracy, I am a dirty communist. If I challenge patriarchy I am a feminist bitch. If I challenge military invasions from a feminist point of view I am supposed to suffer from a bad case of phallic envy. I live in a democracy. Am I free? NO! Do I think freedom is a misnomer? YES! A long time back Rousseau wrote, “men have to be forced to be free”. Humans are born servile. The biggest flaw in human design is our tendency to bend at the knee. Even if we inhabit democratic universes we still consider ourselves under the guardianship of a higher power, a GOD or something we cannot define. Where do you see freedom? We thrive on the chains that bind us. We love our servility. We get turned on by bondage.

Just because an army did not blow up a train in Spain, attack Ayodhya this month and attack London’s transport system, does not mean all military organizations are less ‘terrorist’ than organizations like ‘Lashkar-e-taiba’ and Al Qaeda. The Indian military’s atrocities in Assam and Jammu and Kashmir are well documented. The treatment of prisoners of war in Guantanamo bay and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal testify to the modernity of terror. We talk in terms of human rights, but at the same time we support unilateral interventions and economic sanctions in the name of those same human rights. We believe world poverty should end and yet continue to allow supermodels, pornography and advertising to dominate our thoughts and our newspapers. We are the privileged and frankly, my dears, we don’t give a damn about how the rest of the world lives.

Perhaps terrorism is a way for the marginalized to say, ‘wake up, we’re here too’. In every language on earth there is a word for ‘war’ and there is a ‘word’ for peace. Terror and coercion are a necessary off shoot of unequal processes of development, progress and modernization. While one section of the world benefits from capitalism, better production technologies, access to communication and information, absence of disease; the other sections of the world are necessarily impoverished and kept in economic subjugation not only by processes unique to development and modernization, but also due to selfish political leadership, lack of universal visions, ethnic conflict, famine, drought, lack of any sector of comparative advantage and destroyed-by-colonialism social structures and primitive economic institutions. At times like these, in places like these fundamentalisms rear their ugly heads. It is no coincidence that most right-wing tendencies tend to rise in times of economic crises across the world. Instances are the Nazis in the post-Treaty of Versailles (which destroyed Germany economically) era, or the Hindu Right in India in a turbulent era of economic reforms. Most susceptible are those who are not only economically disadvantaged, but also those youths who crave for change, for rebellion. Rebellion is a natural condition of young people across the world. Be it the JNU style lefties or the Berkeley style social democrats, the youth are amongst those most thrilled and attracted by the lure of new and sometimes dangerous ideologies.

I have never heard of a suicide bomber above the age of 30. Perhaps we could stretch the upper limit to 35. This is not coincidental. There are those that prey on the political innocence of the young ones and in this manner further their own particularistic ends. As youngsters we are all communists and ideologically motivated rebels and reformers. Albert Camus’ The Just Assassins tells us that rebellion is for its own sake and for the sake of the people and that a person dedicated to the cause of the rebellion is never wrong. Camus also tells us that no ideology survives a cold long and lonely night in solitude as man is a creature riddled with doubts. The strength of any ideology lies in the extent to which it can put itself in an unquestionable position. That means, by extension, ideologies, especially militant and fundamentalist ones, thrive on a negation of the rational and seek first and foremost to suppress those instincts that make us human by guiding us to sacrifice ourselves in what is ostensibly a ‘higher’ cause. The youth is offered martyrdom as a reward. We know there can be no reward for being the source of death and destruction. Why doesn’t the dissident/terrorist understand this? What is so phenomenally different in the way they reason and structure their arguments?

I do not claim to know the secrets of the terrorist’s mind. I only say that whatever it is that leads unassuming and ‘clean’ young men to become performers and agents of holy texts, has to be countered not with persecution, coercion and violence, but with a battle that has to be waged with the mind. I do not argue for a Gandhian ‘lets turn the other cheek’ kind of method. I argue instead for a strategic dismantling of that one structure which I see as the root of all the evils in the world – RELIGION.

Religion, as practiced today, is not a product of rational thought but is a forced extension of what a bunch of MEN came up with centuries ago. I have always radically maintained that the first to secede from the world’s organized religions should be women for the simple reason that all our prophets have been men who lived in times when female emancipation meant something completely different. Why would I as a rational, self-originating female want to follow rules laid down by some MAN centuries ago? I do not seek to scoff at the contributions of great prophets, but only wish to point out that when times change, ideologies must change. If we must keep religion, we must reform it. If we are incapable of reforming it, we must reject it. Today we are dealing with the category of ‘Islamic terrorism’. I understand that to mean terror drawn on or supposedly sanctioned by Islam and its holy book. In the same way the Crusades were sanctioned by the Catholic clerics. Yet they were ‘crusades’ (noble in objective) and not acts of invasion or terror. So from this if we can infer that to some extent all holy books can be interpreted to support violence and terror, then is it not time to start getting rid of them? Clerics everywhere create a lot of trouble. They scare, frighten, threaten, coax, cajole, punish and basically keep humankind incarcerated in invisible psychological bonds which are extremely difficult to break. Be it the Hindu pundits who have been extremely brutal to the SC’s, the Catholic priests who supported witch-hunts and inquisitions and Muslim clerics who interpret jihad politically to sanction violence; couched in religion and those who lead us to it, is deep violence and terror.

We are terrorized, not socialized, into religion, made god-fearing and this is supposed to make us moral beings. As children we are told about heaven and hell and this becomes an obsession till the day we die. In trying to live right we forget to live at all. And young men like the London suicide bombers decide that in order to live they will have to die. They were fooled. Fooled by religion, fooled by clerics, fooled by ideology and above all fooled by the belief that they were somehow contributing to the betterment of some peoples of the world – their own community. They were wrong and the people who fooled them still roam the earth. We do not know who these people are and how they managed to convince young men to sacrifice their lives. We can only try and prevent more young men and women from joining their ranks. We are not fighting against a terrorist organization, but are up against a ‘thought’ and its invocation of glory and immortality and change. The young assassins from Leeds are long gone. They are free from the moral pontification that plague disturbed young people like me. I think of their deaths as a tragic waste of human life and only wish they had not taken others with them. I sympathize with the families of those left dead by these attacks. I sympathize with the innocent Muslim women and children who really have had nothing to do with whatever war and terror the world is seeing today. I sympathize with those who have lost their lives to acts of terror in India, US, UK, Spain, Indonesia. In the same vein, I sympathize with the men and women of Vietnam, Angola, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Cambodia.

In our haste to blame, we forget to mention that the entire colonialism project and the civilizing mission were based on terror. But because the colonizing power left behind railways and a bunch of English speaking people we think colonialism was great. There was violence in the spread of capitalism in the world. Wherever the new mercantilist class went, it was backed by newly formed states’ coercive might. Look what happened to India. First the ships came, then the traders, then an MNC (East India Company), then the military and finally India was assimilated into the British empire. Indian princes waged war unsuccessfully against people toting gun-powder laden weapons. Our plodding elephants were no match for swift Mughal horses and horsemen. Native Americans were killed swiftly by firearms. Their tomahawks and bows and arrows were useless against these. If violence has been the foundation of historical evolution, if the project of state-making and nation building was from its very inception based on the existence of coercion, if its is wars and clashes of kingdoms which we read about most in our history textbooks; where do we see this as ending. After the collapse of the USSR Fukuyama wrote that we had reached the end of history. No one, with the exception of Samuel Huntington, foresaw the rise of fundamentalist Islam.

Our generation is one of the few that has seen decolonization, assassinations, collapse of ideologies, political coups, nuclear proliferation, and leaps in technology, rise of religious fundamentalisms, economic crises, and decline of morality, rare comets and planetary discoveries. The latest in the string of events we have to come to terms with is why people in our age group are turning to regressive and militant ideological paths. What is missing from the world today? What are these young men and women searching for? My guess is the youth of today yearns for a higher morality which is missing in the world today. We are surrounded by pornography which titillates but also disgusts, some of us come from broken homes and have lived through broken relationships. Human life is cheap and a couple of bullets bought for a few dollars from Walmart is all it takes to end a life. On the one hand our huge defense establishments produce enough weapons and ammunition to destroy the world 17 times over. On the other hand, we think ‘judicious’ use of this weaponry happens when they are sold to tense countries like India and Pakistan and warring factions in countries of starving Africa. We are all armed to the teeth, we can own guns and ‘just shoot me’ bills of Florida make us believe we have the right to kill even if we feel remotely threatened. In this way all serial killers and rapists are terrorists, anyone who pulls out a gun on anyone else is a terrorist, police brutality is terrorism, wars are terrorist activities, and wife-beaters are terrorists.

Now is not the time to point fingers at communities and blame them for whatever is going wrong with the world. There is an Osama because he was created by the US and today thousands of innocents are paying the price for his creation. We can fight terrorism only by chipping away at the rudiments of its ideology. Such ideologies are based on hatred of the ‘other’, the creation of a ‘faceless collective enemy’ who deserves to be punished brutally. In India Hindus ‘other’ Muslims, and the SC’s other caste Hindus. The West ‘othered’ the Orient and now it is ‘othering’ Islam. People like Osama have ‘othered’ the West. Caught in between are those of us who are caught up with the dull compulsion of economic living. We are those that pay the price for nation-states greed, capitalists profit-seeking and religious clerics sheer need to hang on to political and spiritual power. In the end we are the ones who lose our lives and have our dreams crushed by the might of clashing ideologies. We are not safe watching movies, riding a bus, going to work, school, play or for a drink at a local pub. The innocents are turned into an example of god only knows what. Our dead bodies are supposed to be some kind of a political statement and our bleeding tongues and severed limbs are to speak to the world of injustice, greed, violence and political ambition. We are buried or cremated and our epitaphs only say we lived and we died. The voiceless majority of the world’s population pays the price for the battles of a few men and their ideologies and the economic greed that underlies it all.

Perhaps the only man to understand that violence only begets violence was Gandhi, who transferred violence to another level where it could not cause bodily harm to anyone, but got the point across. Gandhi was Antonio Gramsci’s ideal ‘passive revolutionary’, who managed to exert a moral force on the most powerful nation on earth and turned a war of maneuver into a war of position. Today when I cannot see a way out of the current predicament, I can only hope for a revival of Gandhism. He armed a nation of millions which was too poor to afford weapons, and too traumatized by the British and internally divided to even stand together and fight. But in the 1920’s Gandhi led an army made of people like you and me and fought Empire. For all his faults and misgivings he still dug a way out of a repressive quagmire. He gave the angry youth of India a way of living without destroying and taught them to respect even the enemy. The young terrorists from Leeds are a symptom of a generation searching for a cause, a generation not anchored properly to whatever the values are that make human evolution so great. What we need today is not more military strategy, but more structures initiatives for peace without guns tucked into the back of our pockets, or strapped to our thighs.